Gamification In News : July 2017

Organizations today are placing a disproportionate focus on capability development, at an individual, departmental, and pan-organization level. Business and HR leaders are looking at it as the differentiator to drive competitive advantage by delivering beyond business expectations. Also, learning is being treated as a key component of the employee value proposition, offering engagement and career growth opportunities.

Richard Noble, the director of the Bloodhound Project, says that he has been “infected” since a young age by the desire to chase the land speed record, being relentless in his pursuit over the past 30 years to keep the winning title out of the hands of the Americans.

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. In the Future of eSports Part 2, I discussed how different existing titles and genres compare in balancing the player and the spectator experience.

With technology changing rapidly, can a foodservice provider keep in touch with customers in ways they want to be reached? Is it possible for a small company to have all the technology tools it needs, from mobile loyalty offerings to online employee training?

As a lawyer working at challenging legal and consulting firms, Michael Held was struck by one irony: no matter how many health benefits they enjoyed, many employees were plagued by family or health-related issues that prevented them from giving all to their jobs.

On Monday morning, TriNet debuted its redesigned sales and marketing offices meant to help employees “launch their dreams.” The redesigned offices, dubbed “the launchpad,” are modeled around the needs and wants of today’s workforce. Increasingly, that means catering to the millennial generation.

The winners of the 15th anniversary edition of the Imagine Cup were just announced in Redmond this morning. Xglu from the Czech Republic developed an app that gives children with diabetes a cheap, easy and reliable way to measure and monitor their glucose levels. Instead of lugging around bulky batteries and embarrassing looking medical equipment, …

We live in unusual times and enterprises of every size in every sector are being forced to dance to a faster, less predictable beat. John Shields, Deputy Dean and Associate Dean Education at the University of Sydney Business School, says that “disruptive megatrends” such as technological disruption including artificial intelligence and robotics, urbanisation, an aging …

We are staring at an apocalypse. This can only be averted if efficient practices are integrated into industries and services The future of water will be a gamble – resting entirely on the way we decide to play the game here on.

Indiana CIO Dewand Neely became the director of the state’s Office of Technology in 2015. He was one of the first employees hired to spearhead Indiana’s IT consolidation efforts in 2005, but now he’s turning his attention to protecting state agencies from possible cyber threats. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

As you might have guessed, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is all about motivation. It tries to classify our reasons for being motivated to do something and explains why we are motivated. Although much research into motivation has been done and quite some theories have been proposed to explain motivation, extrinsic and intrinsic motivation is just one of those.

Gamers and computer owners are joining forces with EVE Online’s Project Discovery and IBM’s World Community Grid in what could be a future avenue for accelerating underfunded scientific research. Nearly 50,000 people are hunting for new planets outside Earth’s solar system in the massively multiplayer game EVE Online, thanks to a recent tweak from developer […]

Neil Kulkarni’s latest obsession might seem like an Internet-of-Things project but he’s only a school kid learning how to code. The 14-year-old spends an hour every day after school hooked to an app on his mother’s phone.

A memory game that you can play on the iPad may help ward off the telltale signs of early-stage dementia. Researchers from the University of Cambridge in England developed a “brain-training game” called Game Show, and found that people who played it on a regular basis saw improvements in episodic memory and were better able to recall complex visualizations.

Game companies are early adopters. Many innovations common in today’s enterprise and SMB technology environment-the cloud, micro-payments, robust mobile apps, SaaS, and cyber-attack mitigation solutions-were first pioneered by video game developers. For Sandbox Interactive, developers of a mobile and PC game released this month called Albion Online, the cloud was instrumental in keeping costs manageable while still developing a AAA product that hosts hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.

Merkle Loyalty Solutions Group (formerly 500friends) recently released a comprehensive report titled, “The Great Loyalty Reset: Defining the Future of Loyalty for Retail and CPG brands,” which was based on a global survey of loyalty program managers and consumers. Sara Hogan, director, growth marketing, for Merkle Loyalty Solutions Group, talked to Loyalty360 about this eye-opening report.

Currency trading, or forex, is not a novel idea. For as long as there have been currencies, there have been people trading them to make money. The practice can be traced all the way back to Biblical times, when money changers in the Holy Land charged travellers a fee to change their currency.

When Colin Angle visited Bermuda in 2015 and first saw lionfish-an invasive species that has decimated local fish populations with its ravenous appetite-it wasn’t the first time he had heard about the problem. But it was the first time that Angle, who is the cofounder of iRobot, the tech company that makes the Roomba, started to think that he might be able to help solve it.

Technology isn’t necessarily the best solution for forging new real life connections, whatever the collective marketing spiel of the web’s social giants likes to claim. An especially tricky type of human connection for an app to ‘fix’ is making new friends, as friendships are often forged in the fire of random real life experience.

Starting a new job is a major life change. It’s like the first day of school and a new relationship rolled into one. Weeks or months of applications and interviews have culminated in that exciting first day. Don’t let long hours of paperwork, company jargon and slide shows suck the spark out of your new employees.

The stage had been set for AR’s popularization for years, but it was finally Pokémon Go that brought a mainstream audience to the technology last summer. The game’s debut in the summer of 2016 established AR as a formidable tool in the marketer’s playbook and accelerated the rate at which the digital and real worlds merged, experts say, looking back on the craze.

“We personalize learning all the time, we just don’t call it that,” says special education teacher Gina Tesoriero who has been teaching middle schoolers for over a decade. “When you give students open-ended challenges or design prompts, they actually personalize it themselves, bringing in their own interests and coming in at the level that is best for them.”

Photo credit: Shutterstock In the dynamic business landscape of our times, challenges have become the sole constants in every sector. A market that hitherto thrived on the power of self-motivation is now faced with the challenge of productivity in the age of boredom. Today’s factors continue to scale down productivity at work.

London is competitive. The city thrums with the energy of contest – it’s part of its DNA. Indeed, one way to beguile a Londoner is to promise competition: watch the glint illuminate their eyes as they set them on the prize. And this is particularly true in the world of boutique fitness.

Americans are attending events and are feeling community-minded when they do, and Millennials are in the forefront. A survey conducted in April by Eventbrite, a global event technology platform, in partnership with Ipsos and Crowd DNA, found that 78 percent of American adults respondents age 18 and older attended a live event in the past 12 months.

The world of work is changing: 65 per cent of children entering primary school today will be employed in jobs that do not yet exist, according to the World Economic Forum in its 2016 report The Future of Jobs .

It’s never been harder for agencies to recruit needed talent, up against often higher paying options at tech giants. Here’s how five agencies are deviating from the well-trodden path of intern schemes and headhunters to ensure their clients represent the panoply of people they target around the globe.

Experts Zudu engages with Dundee users to offer advice – and tells them where to find free condoms Young adults around Dundee can now use an app developed by a Nethergate firm to find the nearest free condoms. NHS Tayside has worked with Dundee digital marketing experts, Zudu to create a series of new apps, starting with a digital update of the Condom Card Scheme which helps young people in Tayside make safer choices.

The UK gaming industry is growing exponentially. Last year was a record year for both the monetary value of the UK gaming market (£4.33bn) and its impact on other sectors, such as films and merchandising (£100.5m).

Earlier this year, ArcSecond started working with the Dubai Health Authority (DHA) to transform physical therapy and rehabilitation in Dubai across all its facilities. Advances in science and technology have changed many facets of our modern lives. These breakthroughs promote higher efficiency with quicker, more accurate results, beneficial to patients and doctors in healthcare facilities.

Has the resume outlived its usefulness? Niklas Jungegard thinks so. Jungegard, an entrepreneur based in Sweden, leads a company called Sqore, which runs a platform meant to provide a better way than resumes to match applicants and employers, and students with educational opportunities.

Recruiters and talent acquisition professionals are gearing up their game to win the war for talent. They are constantly on the lookout for new and innovative ways to better attract, engage, and assess potential candidates. One such skill that they must learn is to integrate latest technologies with the hiring process.

Contact Centers are some of the most technically sophisticated operations in the enterprise, putting to use more than 45 systems and applications. Companies are striving to understand customer needs, engage Millennial customers and employees, increase the use of self-service tools, improve service quality while reducing costs, simplify operating environments, and reduce fraud, and they’re looking to vendors for help.

I recently played a game of 20 questions with Alexa and my seven-year-old niece. There was cause for much hilarity and also a great deal of fascination at interacting with this sometimes very smart/sometimes not bot.

“I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.” Winston Churchill’s quote could serve well to define the millennial generation of today. Born between 1980 and 2000, the millennials have grown up in a time of rapid change.

Gaming and gamification guru Jane McGonigal is well known both as a TED speaker and as a favorite on the tech keynote circuit. McGonigal’s lucidly presented arguments include notions that center around the way gamers are incentivized to succeed, often participate in team group goals (in multiplayer games) and work towards (albeit fabricated) game objectives that can ultimately be reflected in the way we humans train ourselves to cope with real world challenges.

Gamification is a highly engaging tool, one that enraptures the player and creates an immersive experience. It creates a fun experience, and if designed well, can help drive greater learning and retention. Little wonder that it is trending at the workplace as an add-on to carry out different HR and business interventions.

Your employees are great people, but it’s your job as a manager or business owner to get the most from them by bringing the best out in them. Gamification is a commonly used term over the past few years in the marketing industry, human resources, sales, and entrepreneurship.

If you’re a true gamer, a little bit of you might die when you hear the word gamification. Gamification just sounds a bit pseudo… like bogus Consultant-babble. In fact, many people working in mobile games, never once heard or use the word frequently.

Dheeraj Sharma, CEO, Playablo, Bengaluru Have you ever wondered why you never have to motivate children to go out and play with friends as opposed to studying? Why they always remember film and cartoon trivia more than equations and theorems, and why they prefer playing video games over reading textbooks?

The students who worked at the Winona State University library were good at their jobs, but Mackenzie Morning, a circulation technician, thought they could be even better. So she created a game. She made simple buttons she called “library flair” and gave them out when she noticed a student doing an especially good job.